Media 2018

Composer and performer Jessica Pavone presents new works with her string ensemble, consisting of Erica Dicker (violin), Angela Morris (violin), Joanna Mattrey (viola), and Pavone herself (viola). As both an instrumentalist and composer, Jessica Pavone has regularly and thematically explored tactile experience and the use of the body in her compositions and performances.

Paul de Jong, cellist and co-founder of celebrated experimental duo the Books, performs his signature emotional acrobatics with the aid of cellos, or “what used to be cellos,” in addition to a bottomless library of exotic americana, absurdist sound and video snippets, mismatched costumes and hats, fake teeth and moustaches -- all purposefully over-formalized and under-rehearsed.

Brutal Measures is a collaboration between Lydia Lunch and Weasel Walter, two innovators of the most challenging, aggressive, and uncompromising nether regions of no wave, free jazz, electroacoustic composition, and spoken word.

Straight Panic is the queer nihilist power electronics project of Thomas Boettner, formerly from Minneapolis, MN and now based in New Orleans, LA. Against assimilation, against ease, Straight Panic matches the intensity of queer rage and desire to richly layered sound, drawing on sources such as the writing of Dennis Cooper to the atrocities of the current “gay purge” in Chechneya.

ISSUE presents an evening of overlapping improvisations between computer music pioneer Carl Stone, composer and performer Ned Rothenberg, and Tokyo-based vocalist and cross-media artist Ami Yamasaki.

Eric Frye follows his exceptional 2017 ISSUE performance with Obfuscation Morphologies, a work that Fernando Zalamea, professor at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, describes as “an outstanding concrete sheafification of sounds drawing on conceptual motivations coming from Charles Sanders Peirce's studies on nerve excitations."

ISSUE presents the debut U.S. performance of Argentine acousmatic composer Beatriz Ferreyra. Ferreyra began her composing career incidentally, having been exposed to the musical methods of Pierre Schaeffer and the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, shortly after moving from her native Argentina to Paris in the 1960s.

Adam Tendler presents a selection of unique works chosen especially for ISSUE, performing a repertoire of works from David Lang, Elodie Lauten, Frances White, and Tom Johnson.

Bertucci celebrates the release of Metal Aether, her second album on NNA Tapes (following 2017’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air), by presenting recent works for alto saxophone and tape that appear on the record, as well as a new composition that is directly informed by the particular acoustic qualities of 22 Boerum Place.

Olivia Block performs a new multiple speaker composition, continuing an ongoing investigation into the properties of wind and its related sounds and symbolic themes. Using a microphone and her breath, small fans, and other small objects on its surface, Block creates aural patterns and “currents” in the room, processing and moving sounds live on her laptop.

ISSUE presents a duo performance between Brandon Lopez and celebrated Detroit-born jazz drummer Gerald Cleaver, a close collaborator of Lopez’s in numerous configurations (including distinct trios with Andria Nicodemou, Nate Wooley, Keir Neuringer, as well as in various large ensemble formats).

Fairer Than Tongue is partly inspired by the grotesquely humorous painting of the beating of Saint Anthony of Padua and its correlation to the imprisonment and torture of the Pedro Albizu Campos (Leader of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Movement) by the US Government. Technically, Lopez employs compositional cells of traditional notation and text to aid in developing and shaping the piece.